Pockets of reasonableness and harmony will appear as if from nowhere!

[This post, transferred from my original blog, Family Life, which is no longer accessible, is even more to the point now than it was in October 2007.]

Via Making Light’s Particles, I draw your attention to the Unitarian Jihad, as reported by Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle. (If you don’t know any Unitarians, you should. Someone – it might have been Erasmus Darwin – described Unitarianism as a mattress to catch a falling Protestant.)

Beware! Unless you people shut up and begin acting like grown-ups with brains enough to understand the difference between political belief and personal faith, the Unitarian Jihad will begin a series of terrorist-like actions. We will take over television studios, kidnap so-called commentators and broadcast calm, well-reasoned discussions of the issues of the day. We will not try for ‘balance’ by hiring fruitcakes; we will try for balance by hiring non-ideologues who have carefully thought through the issues.

We are Unitarian Jihad. We will appear in public places and require people to shake hands with each other.

A moment in Norwegian history. The king chooses what the film judges to be the lesser of two evils. The wretchedness of a country being invaded is made viscerally real. A spectacular sequence where a German battleship is destroyed by artillery and torpedoes. No Hollywood heroics; no Hollywood resolution.

Benjamin Law in conversation with David Marr at the Seymour Centre the other night did a great job of making me want to read this: for another horror story about the Australian on the warpath, and also for a factual account of the Safe Schools program that was the target of that mendacious warpath. (And predictably they attacked him personally when the essay […]

x a family sitcom that revolves around a boy with Aspergers in high school who has managed extraordinarily well up to this point, but whose dawning interest in sex is throwing things into turmoil. Not just played for laughs, but funny just the same.